Camping Day Three

I've been working on schoolwork all week, which is why I haven't posted about the last day of our camping trip, and also why I'm still not posting about the last day of our camping trip.  Suffice it to say, it was delightful, we drove home, no one threw up in the car, etc.  I will, however, give you some pictures that I think you'll enjoy.

The day we were scheduled to go home, we made one last trip out to Goblin Valley, this time for a distinct purpose: so Ryan could dress up as a Stormtrooper and take pictures with the alien-planet-like background.  It was his birthday, also it was the whole reason he was so supportive of going on this trip in the first place, so it had to get done.

Funny.  I might update this with more photos later, but it's late and I need to go to bed.  I got the important ones up, at any rate.

Camping, Day Two

Morning is a surly time on the best of occasions, but when morning starts at 5:52, you know we're in for a special level of torture.  Here's how I imagined morning on a campout being: crisp morning air, sun rising over the mountains, we're swinging on the porch swing, sipping hot chocolate while taking in the serene, calming beauty.

Here's how the morning really went:  Up before the sun, hot chocolate getting dumped on the ground causing a Zack-level eruption, porch swing being used as ammo in a game of Whack-a-Brother, me shushing for an hour so neighbors (and spouses) can hopefully get a little more sleep, being told that my shushing is too loud, finally giving up and ordering Zack inside to watch Toy Story on the portable dvd player.  Surrounded by natural beauty and all of God's wonders, and I still, STILL have to resort to plugging one of my kids in.  This is an epic camping fail.

Although maybe I'm being too harsh.  In all honesty, take out the outdoors part and the hot chocolate part and this is a typical hotel morning.  Any morning that I have to deal with the kids at 5:52 a.m. is going to be lousy.  Trying to keep kids quiet so other people can sleep is a documented cause of parental insanity. (Trust me, I know.)  This problem isn't camping-specific - it's a symptom of traveling with children.

One problem that IS camping-specific, or more accurately, KOA-specific, are the cabin doors.  The cabin is solid wood, floors, walls, ceilings, all of it.  The doors have a locking mechanism that is vaguely reminiscent of the bars medieval castles used to close their doors to invaders.  A handle on the outside pulls a rope that lifts the bar on the other side, allowing the door to be pushed open.  Nifty, right?  The only problem is that it is the loudest door-opening mechanism ever invented by man.  The invention of the doorknob is what catapulted medieval man into the modern era.  The wooden bar scrapes and clanks, the handle rattles, the door itself sticks and has to be forced open.  We may as well attach a bell to it - no one is coming or going without waking the entire family.

An exchange taking place at, oh, 8:00 or so.

Noah:  Are people still sleeping?

Me:  Probably.  I would be if I could.

Noah:  Geez, people sleep for hours!

I don't want to sound completely negative, because overall we had a very nice day, but I have one more complaint:  Google Maps.   We've all had minor maps-related snafus - being directed to a dead end, going to a business address that no longer exists - a friend recently had to walk through a field to show up at the back door of the address she was looking for.  That's the cost of convenience, I say.  Well, I say wrong, apparently.  Because today Google Maps failed on such a massive scale I wouldn't be surprised if this was a belated April Fool's Joke.  From our campground in Green River, Google instructed us to take US-6 westbound, i.e. back toward home.  So we did.  For 45 minutes.   The promised left-hand turn that would take us to Goblin Valley never appeared.  And, naturally, neither did our cell service.  We turned around and finally got a hold of the camp, asking for directions - we should have been on I-70 westbound.  What should have been a 30 minute drive ended up being about two hours, which would make this a Mudgett-scale "shortcut."  Fortunately, everyone handled it really well - no one freaked out, although we endured an extra 1.5 hours of "are we there yets" until I threatened to leave Noah on the side of the road and let him walk to Goblin Valley, see how long it takes you then, buddy.

(I was just kidding about that.  I wouldn't actually make my kid get out of the car and walk.  But it made him stop asking, finally.)

Goblin Valley itself is just too cool for words.  I forgot to pack my USB adapter for my camera so authentic pictures are going to have to wait, but here's a picture I found online and I can attest, yup, it looks just like that in real life.

(Thanks for the image, Google, but you haven't made it up to me yet.  I'm still sulking.)

The kids took off running and pretty much didn't stop for an hour.  They climbed over and through these crazy rock formations.  The sun was shining but there was a cool breeze - it couldn't have been more perfect weather.  They slowed down and a couple started to get testy, so we hiked from that far rock wall in the picture back through the goblins to the parking lot for lunch.  The kids were done at that point, even though we had only been there about 1.5 hours.  We've learned not to push things, though - the extra hour we could have squeezed out of them would have come at a great price in whining.  Not worth it.  We'll go back tomorrow before we head home, though.  Ryan brought his stormtrooper armor in order to take pictures with that alien planet-like background.  That's going to be a spectacle.  I'm salivating already.

The drive back to the camp was substantially shorter, thank goodness.  Ryan stayed behind to take a nap but when it was apparent that no children would be joining him (*shakes her fist in anger*) I took them to a beach.  All these years of people talking about Goblin Valley and no one mentioned that there's a beach in Green River?  It was awesome!  I no longer feel the need to drive to California this summer.  The beach was situated at a bend in the river, deep into a canyon - the water was swiftly flowing in the middle but created mild wavelets on the shore.  The shore was fine sand and there was no seaweed/decomposing fish smell from the ocean which is nice, but the water was freezing.  Didn't stop them, though - the kids jumped right in.  We stayed well past the point where Darcey was shivering and blue-lipped because they were having so much fun.

Brad's campfire prowess showed itself tonight when he lit the fire with a single match.  We cooked hot dogs for dinner then shared s'mores with a family that used to live in our neighborhood who happened to be here.  The kids are looking exhausted at 8:30 p.m. - I'm not far behind them.  My fingers are crossed that we all make it through the night without nature calling.  Curse that astronaut-stalker for ensuring that we can never wear diapers for convenience.  (Ryan thinks that reference was too obscure- tell me if you agree and I'll take it out.)

One last thought for the night.

Zack:  I'm so cold.  I wish Jesus would come down and give me a coat.  And I'd say, "Thank you, Jesus!"

Bug Count:

3 gnats orbiting my head at the playground

1 anonymous possible bug that fell out of a tree and hit Ryan on the head

Several more gnats attacking the laptop screen while Ryan and I watched Thursday's Survivor

1 spider on the door to our cabin that Ryan had to chase around in order to stomp on

Things I've Forgotten To Bring:

Pocket knife

Cold cereal (Did not forget the milk, bowls, spoon)

Garbage bags

Zack's coat

Chapstick

White-noise machine

USB cable

Camping, Day One

We got a later start than I expected.  Much later.  I got home from school at 2:30, figured we'd pack and throw our stuff in the car and hit the open road by, say, 3:30.  What I didn't count on was that packing for a campout requires roughly 200 more items than packing for a hotel trip.  I consider myself something of a packing expert (for my family, at least.)  I had trial packing runs before our trip to Europe.  If anything, I tend to overpack rather than underpack.  Not so this time.  In fact, it is likely that I have dangerously underpacked, even though our minivan was so full it was bulging like a cartoon drawing of a stuffed minivan would be.

The problem with camping is that you need to pack a duplicate of every single useful item in your house including, but not limited to, furniture, bedding, kitchen appliances, and the entertainment center.  Random items that aren't useful in regular life become essential.  Take, for instance, matches.  I use them six times a year, to light birthday candles.  Our family could conceivably survive just fine on a single matchbook for the entire year.  In contrast, Brad used a match for every man, woman, and child in Utah trying to light our campfire tonight.

The campfire, by the way, was a heroic moment for Brad.  Considering the last time I was involved with campfire-making was when I went to Girl's Camp in 1992, we called upon our current Scouter to get our fire going.  He built a nice stack of kindling and lit it, but it went out.  The next match too.  And on, I won't get into the tedious details here.  At some point, he gave up, but I could see there were some decent embers underneath the whole thing.  Using the elite campfire-making skills I learned watching Survivor, I blew on the pile of smoldering sticks.  After about a minute of blowing, the whole stack exploded into flames!  The kids started cheering and Brad went back to work, piling more wood in a careful array.  I was so happy he could have his moment.  If we could have, we would have put him on our shoulders and marched him around the campground, we were so proud of him.

I'm excited about the trip so far, but considering that it's 10:48 p.m. right now and three of the four kids are still awake (and complaining about the snoring of the fourth) I'm apprehensive.  Bad sleep is never a good thing in our family.  Here are some memorable moments so far:

What's your favorite thing so far?

Zack: Playing the wii.

Me:  I meant camping.

Zack:  Oh, then, the playground.

Noah walks out in pajama pants and no shirt.  He is a younger version of Axl from "The Middle" - the teenage boy who wears just his boxers all day long. I said, "Noah, I told you to pack WARM pajamas." Noah, pointing to his pants:  "These ARE warm."

Bug Count:

3 gnats orbiting my head at the playground

1 anonymous possible bug that fell out of a tree and hit Ryan on the head

Things I've Forgotten To Bring:

Pocket knife

Cold cereal (Did not forget the milk, bowls, spoon)

Garbage bags

Zack's coat

A-Camping We Will Go

Ryan and I are taking the kids camping tomorrow.  What's that sudden chill - oh, my goodness, hell has frozen over!  If you've known my family for any length of time, you would know that we are not, as they say, "camping people."  We are hotel people.  Ryan and I can both safely blame our parents for this lack of ruggedness.  My dad thought "roughing it" meant a hotel without cable.  Ryan's parents never went camping either, plus he dropped out of Scouts well before overnighters were required.  He pretty much loathes camping.  The annual Fathers and Sons campout is always scheduled on the exact same weekend as Ryan's Whine-a-palooza.  Funny how that is.

I've had this growing inclination over the last year or two to spend more time out in nature.  Something about communing with beauty and simplicity and growing things has been working its way under my skin.  Which is strange, given that I'm not a real big fan of being outside.  In general, I'm not fond of: bugs, extreme heat, extreme cold, dirt, and campfire smoke.  I'd prefer a clean, climate-controlled, bug-and-smoke free space to vacation in - a.k.a. a hotel.

So the fact that we're taking our kids camping - voluntarily, no less - is something of a wonder.  A friend told me about a deal that the KOA campgrounds (I refuse to call them 'kampgrounds' like they do - purposeful misspelling makes me want to throw things.)  Their (c)abins this weekend are buy one night, stay the next free.  So we get the whole weekend away for about $100.  You know me and a good deal - even if it means sacrificing bodily comfort, we're doing it.

Here are a few things I'm expecting to have to deal with this weekend:

-not having the right equipment, i.e. sleeping bags, camp stove, cooler

-sleeping/temperature issues

-not knowing how to build a fire

-waking up at the crack of dawn

-bugs, dirt, and campfire smoke (if we can get a fire lit, see above)

But I'm not one to back away from a challenge, no sir!  I come from tough stock, Connecticut farmers who worked from sunup to sundown in blistering heat and freezing cold.  Am I going to let some measly bugs and dirt stand in the way of connecting with nature?  No!  I'm going out there and I'm not coming back until I'm a tree-hugging, dirt-loving, dutch-oven-cooking, honest-to-goodness camper.  If I had pioneer ancestors, I'd make them proud.  This is going to be a great weekend!

(Plus they have free wifi at the (c)ampground so worst case scenario, I can order Domino's online.  Or send an S.O.S. on Facebook.  Wish us luck!)

Babies Don't Keep

Darcey, at age 2-and-eleven/twelfths, is still sleeping in a crib.  She is quite verbose now, which means that at 8:30 I hear, "Mom!  Wake up!  Get me out of here!" which always makes me chuckle.  Today I picked her up and was rewarded with a rare moment of cuddling.  She laid her head on my shoulder and I rocked her back and forth.  Now, chances are she was just using the height advantage to survey the vast pink wasteland that is her bedroom floor, a suspicion that was confirmed when she got down and immediately used Minnie Mouse's head as a chalkboard eraser.  But it doesn't take away that moment of pure, simple joy of holding my daughter.

I've been trying hard this week to notice the moments and appreciate them, those tiny snapshots of perfection that seem to be all older people remember when they think fondly back on their child-rearing days.  It's been easier than I expected, but I attribute that to the absolutely wonderful week I've had, emotionally speaking.  I have felt so even-keeled that I almost forget that I'm on a boat and there still could be rough seas ahead.  (This good week brought to you by GlaxoSmithKline.)  So I'm shutting my laptop more often when a kid is in the room with me, putting down the morning paper when Zack is getting ready for school, keeping the radio off when I'm driving the boys somewhere.  Not all the time, of course, but a little more than before.

In my house growing up there was a needlepoint hung on the wall that had a picture of a mother rocking a baby and it said:

Cleaning and scrubbing can wait til tomorrow

For babies grow up, we've learned to our sorrow.

So quiet down cobwebs, and dust go to sleep,

I'm rocking my baby and babies don't keep.

As I held my last baby this morning, I was conscious of the fact that I can no longer hold her brothers the way I hold her.  That part is over, and it soon will be with Darcey as well.  Have I paid enough attention to the moments?  Can I remember what each of their snuggly little bodies felt like?  I catalog all of the failures and the crises and the wish-this-were-overs; my only hope is that when I'm an old lady my selective memory will cobble together a picture of all the moments of perfection and love and joy.

I believe I will.  I believe that all of us mothers that are in the crucible of child-rearing are doing better than we think.  I believe that our kids see through the mistakes and the frustrations and know that they are loved, and that at the end of the day, that's what counts.  Not how clean our house is, or how much they enjoyed our dinners, or how much baby weight we still carry.  When Brad brings me home my daily flower he's picked off the blossoming trees, it's not to thank me for helping him with his homework.  When Noah gives me spontaneous hugs, it's not because I always know where he left his baseball glove.  We judge ourselves so much about what we do as mothers, but fail to realize that all that matters to our kids is that we love them.  That is what we are as mothers - we are love personified.

So as Mother's Day comes up, that most loved and loathed holiday, let yourself off the hook for all of the things you don't do.  Take a small step towards appreciating the moments more.  And if you'll indulge me, here's a modern woman's needlepoint:

T.V. and iPods can wait til tomorrow

For babies grow up, we've learned to our sorrow.

So quiet down Facebook, phone go to sleep,

I'm rocking my baby and babies don't keep.

Lasik: A Follow-Up (or, I can see clearly now, the glasses are gone)

*Warning - this post is not for the squeamish.  Like me.  But I survived, and chances are you will too.*

*But don't say I didn't warn you.*

I am 24 hours out from yesterday's Lasik surgery, and I am on top of the world.  Here's a rundown of the last day.

The surgery itself was billed as essentially painless, and it was.  Mostly.  I wasn't nervous until I was about to be led, bootied and hairnetted, into the surgery room itself.  Then I was glad I had been given a valium to take the edge off my nerves.  (Really it just made me sleepy, but I definitely did not get as worked up as I do when a dentist is scraping me with some medieval torture device.  Maybe I should start taking valium at the dentist.)

I lay on the table underneath the first laser, which cut a flap in my corneas.  This was the worst part.  The doctor put a ring into my eye to hold open my eyelids, then he pressed it down to create suction.  Ick.  The laser did its thing, which I can't even describe because I was too busy thinking there's a thing on my eyeball! to focus on the details.  The doctor put extra numbing drops in my left eye and it was less uncomfortable, except that there is still something on my eyeball! The creepy factor never goes away, not completely.

Flaps cut, I was moved to a waiting area for 20 minutes or so.  This was the best part.  I sat in this massage chair that was, to put it simply, phenomenal.  I almost got out and made Ryan sit there, to show him how amazing it was, but then again, I was the patient here.  How weird would it look if the nurse came back and Ryan was lounging in the massage chair while my flappy corneas and I looked on from the hard wooden chair nearby?  So really, I stayed in the chair out of propriety.  The chair thumped and rubbed and rolled and squeezed and vibrated and pounded my body until I had to wonder just how much of this I could take and still stand up, considering the valium.  At one point, the headrest lifted so that a different roller could concentrate on my neck, and if the massage chair salesman had been standing there, I would have signed on the dotted line.  When the nurse got me, about five minutes after the massaging stopped, or just long enough for my bones to coalesce, I said, "You guys ought to have a side business selling these chairs, you'd make a mint!"  Either she didn't hear me or she'd heard that quip from every doped up massage-ee to pass through and chose to ignore it.  Whatever.

After my visit to the massaging wonderland, they brought me back in for another round with the laser.  This one did the actual reshaping of my cornea.  First, though, the flap had to be peeled off.  This is as disgusting as it sounds, although at the time all I was aware of was some tugging that made my vision completely whack out.  I was telling my eye to focus on the light above me, but my eye, instead of obeying me, was off looking at the corner instead.  Come to find out (when I watched the way-too-vivid dvd of my surgery for Family Home Evening afterward) that the doctor was, in fact, yanking my eyeball in order to pry open the flap.

I think watching the dvd might have been more emotionally scarring than the actual surgery. Here, you watch it.

This one is the flap-cutting ceremony.



And here's the other half, the actual cornea-reshaping.



Gross, huh?  Add to these lovely visuals the smell of burning flesh and you'll understand why this was much more an emotional trial than a physical one.  The amazing thing was that when I sat up from under the laser, I looked out the window into the viewing room and saw Ryan - and by that I mean, I SAW Ryan.  At the risk of sounding melodramatic, to be able to see Ryan so clearly with just my regular eyes felt miraculous.  And yes, I cried.  Just a little.  Then I spent the next five minutes pointing to all the things I could read.  I love it.

Other than a burning feeling that lasted for about an hour, I had pretty much no pain.  Some dryness, but that's about it.  My vision was foggy at first, but now it's totally clear and the doctor today said my vision is 20/20.  Considering glasses could only correct me to 20/25, I call this a win.

So my plans for the future? Go swimming. Put eye makeup on without having to be so close to the mirror I'm fogging it up with my breath. Have the world's largest collection of sunglasses. And I'm totally serious about that - I plan to buy the biggest, tackiest, most outrageous sunglasses I can find and wear them everywhere. After years of wearing stupid clip-on sunglasses like an old fogey or foregoing them altogether, I cannot wait to wear sunglasses. But mostly, I'm just happy to see. Life is amazing today.

A Farewell to Four-Eyes

I'm doing it.  I'm finally getting Lasik.  By the time you read this, I'll be laying on a table with my eyelids taped open, being forced to stare at a light on the ceiling while a laser slices off my cornea.  While this sounds like a scene from a James Bond film, or possibly the latest torture cooked up by the guys at Gitmo, in fact, I am paying big bucks for this kind of treatment.  We'll find out in a day or so if it's worth it.

I've had a love/hate relationship with my glasses.  Okay, it's more like hate/hate with a dash of well, at least I'm not blind thrown in.  I got my first pair of glasses in third grade.  I was eight, and that same year I also got braces, the kind of double-whammy of ugliness whose sole purpose is to "build character."  I don't remember having that "Look!  I can see the leaves on the trees!" kind of experience when I first got glasses.  In fact, I remember quite clearly leaving them on the windowsill many mornings, causing my teacher to scold me and move me to the front of the classroom.  Apparently I didn't think I was missing much without my glasses.

My glasses didn't have a huge emotional impact on me at the time.  Their effects grew as I got older and kids got meaner.  In elementary school, I was bursting with self-confidence:  to illustrate, in fifth grade I determined (through what evidence I have no idea) that I was the third most popular girl in my class, after Alicia and Nicole.  Alicia moved, though, and I got bumped to the number two spot.  If we hadn't moved to Eldersburg at the end of the year, who knows how popular I would have been?  I was on the fast track to popularity.  I could have been somebody!  I could have been a contender!

But we did move, and my glasses were a prominent part of the instant judgment passed by my new classmates on my first day of school.  As stereotypes go, glasses=smart is not a horribly painful one, but since smart=nerd=dork=victim, you can imagine it wasn't the ideal stereotype heading into middle school.  Oh, and middle school was brutal.  Not all of it, but the bus rides, oh the bus rides.  Why on earth would any adult think its a good idea to cram sixty kids into a bus with no supervision other than the driver who could never possibly see what's going on in the way back where the scary kids sat?  To this day, I prefer to sit up front, near the driver, out of sheer self-preservation.

The glasses-as-target trend faded in high school, for the most part, with a few rather painful exceptions that I thought about disclosing here but won't because, really, they still hurt.  Glasses-as-smart was something I have (rather obviously) internalized.  Being considered "smart" is such a key part of my identity - would that be true if it hadn't been for the 4.0 assumptions made about me in school?  (Which, for the record, I never had, nor did I ever provide my father with his oft-dreamed about "My child is on the honor roll at Liberty High School" bumper sticker.)

They say that the eyes are the window to the soul.  If that's true, then glasses are the sheer curtains people put up for privacy.  Honestly, there is something about glasses that shrank me, made me withdraw behind the protective plexiglass shield in front of my eyes.  I was always aware of them, always self-conscious and, to be blunt, convinced I was unattractive because I wore glasses.  Well, maybe less attractive is a better way to state it.  I know exactly how much my glasses held me back in high school because after I graduated and moved to California, I bought contact lenses and my world changed.  Not only did I see the world differently (three cheers for peripheral vision!) but I found this well of confidence that I didn't know had been dry all these years.  I changed the way I looked on the outside, but the real change happened inside.

Fast forward nine years to 2003.  We had moved to Utah, I had two kids and a horrible case of dry eyes from the desert air.  I abandoned the contacts for glasses again, and at the time it didn't seem like too big a deal.  I was tired of the routine and the work involved in contacts, and since I had already used my feminine wiles to secure a husband, contacts no longer seemed as vital to my self-esteem.  I've been back in glasses for seven years and can barely remember what it was like to be glasses-less anymore.  Ryan has been suggesting Lasik for years now, ever since he got bait-and-switched, but I've been reluctant.  First, I had to wait until I was done having kids, because what's the point of fixing my vision only to have pregnancy screw it up again?  Then, it was fear, because nothing says "bad idea" like "slicing open your cornea."  The thought of whatever they're going to do to keep my eyelids open is enough to get my stomach churning.  (I'm picturing tape, Ryan's picturing toothpicks thanks to a Tom and Jerry cartoon.)  I've reached the point where the perceived benefits outweigh the fear, and that is why I am going under the knife, er, laser today.

I don't know what my reaction is going to be when I'm done with the surgery.  Will I cry with joy?  Will I undergo another reinvention of my self-image?  Will it even work?  (I have very thin corneas, the only part of me that is too thin, of course.)  I don't know.  I know this, though - I won't miss my glasses, not even for one single second.